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Wednesday, January 20, 2010

UNBELIEVABLE. Yep. If I had to summarize my experience late last year with Xbox customer service and support, it would be UNBELIEVABLE.

It all started when my original Xbox 360 took another 'dive' (aka: Red Ring of Death) when I went to rawk on some Guitar Hero: Van Halen. The console/screen/picture simply froze and the buttons and controller would not work. Once I manually powered it off and powered it back on, I got the dreaded Red Ring Of Death. If you recall, this happened to me before as blogged back in January of 2008, so I was really surprised it happened once again. Thankfully, my console was still covered under an extended warranty and was able to get it shipped in for repair/replacement.

During this time, I was able to arrange a buyer of my soon-to-be-fixed console so I could take advantage of a deal for the newer, Xbox Elite system. This console is a nice elegant black unit which blends well with the rest of my A/V equipment and includes a much bigger hard drive to downloading games, content and more. The day I made that Xbox Elite purchase, I made a call into the Xbox support team to place an order for a data migration kit, so I could transfer all the games, gamertags and downloaded content from the old hard drive (which I kept while the old one was being repaired) to the new drive. The order itself was easy as pie. I was told I would have it within 7-10 business days. Cool.

Well, those 7-10 days turned into weeks and eventually over a month! Yes, a month! After placing a call shortly after the 10 day period, I was told the item was on back-order and that I would get one within 5 days or so. "Thanks for the call and/or e-mail on that Xbox."So the next 5 days came and went with no e-mail or notice so I called back in. I was given a runaround yet again; the item was still on back-order and no ETA of when it may be in!

With this botched order along with a warranty confusion/issue on my old console (a whole other story), I had enough.

I tweeted (a term known for 'a post from Twitter') about my frustration and CC'd a very prominent, social-facing representative and employee of Xbox, Larry Nelson, aka: Major Nelson. (As a side note, I 'follow' (another Twitter term) Major Nelson on Twitter as he often 'tweets' about Xbox news, deals and promotions.) I was truly shocked/surprised that Larry responded back to me almost instantly giving me his e-mail address asking for details on my issue/complaint.

I quickly drafted and sent Major an e-mail stating my issues (both with my botched data migration kit as well as the warranty expiration date on my old console) and within a few days I was contacted by someone at Xbox support! This wasn't the 'typical' tech support person, this was a true customer service representative whose sole purpose was to resolve high-priority and escalated issues. I must say that I was treated pretty good and was eventually shipped out a working data migration kit (it took 2 tries as the 1st data migration disc was in a different language).

I could go on and on and may have missed a few details but the bottom line is this: Xbox technical support = CRAP.

PS: On the positive end, they gave me a free Xbox Elite game controller free of charge. (+.5 for them)